Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert (Basic Books, 1980). I go to some effort to teach my kids math at home, to the point that they’re generally a year or two ahead of whatever’s happening at school. Most of my reasons are personal and idiosyncratic: I like math, and it’s fun to share my hobbies with my kids. I also despise the way math is usually taught, and want their first encounter with certain beautiful ideas not to be ruined by a teacher who doesn't really understand them herself.
True and oft forgotten, but even more oft forgotten is that the mean your children regress to is the mean of their parents' families, which doesn't have to be that of the general population. If most of your family or Jane's is a standard deviation or more above the general population, your kids will probably be, too.
"The second thing that happened was that the smartest person I knew told me that he thought intelligence was learned. His argument went something like this: over the course of your life, you pick up cognitive tools that make you more effective."
And do we all pick up these cognitive tools equally efficiently? Why are some people better at picking it up than others? If intelligence itself is learned, then what do you call the mental ability that makes this learning possible and variable?
Reminds me of my education. I can still remember the flashcards and matching games I used to learn arithmetic, and can still do it in my head. As I moved away from such juvenile things like that into proper books full of symbols, my retention faded. I've passed trigonometry twice, but can barely recall anything except for sohcahtoa.
On the other hand, gamification itself doesn't help. My school wound up deleting all the "educational" games off its computers because they weren't accomplishing anything (besides provoking squabbles among students). At some point, the users have to transition from consumers to producers. I don't know how to promote that; personally, I like playing computer games, but I've bounced HARD off of learning to program. And as more things become black boxes guarded by proprietary tech and captured regulation, we're going to see more and more consumers, and fewer maker/modifiers.
I love your ability to write a great and compelling review on books that are totally outside the scope of my life. I have no kids (one of those people who missed the 'Nam chopper), don't work in a STEM field, and I find computer programming frightening and alien. I've always tested very well, so maybe I'm a person sabotaged by those bad teachers as a child, or maybe it's just that I found other subjects more interesting and have been just successful enough to avoid being forced to study other things.
As a non-programmer, I feel like there's a common trend of programmers aspiring to teach EVERYONE to code, and thinking coding is REALLY EASY but that it's TAUGHT WRONG. And yet, in the end, the vast majority of people can't code, and a large share of those who get into it solely to make money without a natural interest in it find it very challenging. Maybe programming is just really tough and luckily a few 'tists are naturally great at it.
Great post! I agree with you that even if Papert didn't precisely nail down the how, he's pointing at a very laden bough of low-hanging fruit. And actually, I think your anecdote about Logo might point to another issue besides the limited-by-engaged-adults one. Using code to move an actual robot seems to promise the tight feedback loop that helps young learners. But I wonder if that feedback loop is *too* tight: there's no need to imagine and predict what might happen in the world. You just type some stuff in and the robot goes or it doesn't. It's like doing a Sudoku where you check for correctness after every input: you don't see the harmony of a good strategy over random guessing, because random guessing works well enough when you can instantly learn if you're in a blind alley or not. It needs to be possible to be well and truly stuck for you to properly value the tools that get you unstuck. But the robot is always there and can't do anything but scoot along anyhow; how stuck can you ever be?
So I think the problem is that it can't *only* be primitives; then you have no motivation to come up with higher order structures. I think the real thing young learners should do with their computers is play roguelikes to cultivate Cyrus The Great's enjoyment of challenge. Get your kids to climb to A20 in Slay The Spire. They'll never succeed in understanding it solely through the brute primitives: if their inner monologue is only using cards like "energy, cards, relic" you might clear the bottom levels but you'll get hardstuck. They'll have to find the chunks that are actually useful ways to conceptualize Spire. Or better yet, they'll have to watch videos of pros explaining themselves, and realize that *they can just steal the developed ontologies of domain experts to leapfrog their development, and this works incredibly well, and why doesn't everyone do this all of the time.* That's how I'd do it. (Disclaimer that I am a classical air-type autist building crystalline mind palaces instead of eating whose parenting experience is "a week of being a summer camp counselor-in-training" and all parenting advice is presumably suspect.)
This captures perfectly why I'm very skeptical at any attempts to use technology to improve education. There are studies and meta-analyses that suggest "give the kids iPads" or whatever it is this year could as well be placebo - quite apart from the fact that if it can be used for TikTok instead, it will be. And that's before we count the opportunity cost that the money you spent on computers could have been put towards teachers.
Will AI solve this problem? It's definitely not there yet, and seems to be better at keeping pupils stuck at the first, shallower type of knowledge than helping them get to the second, deeper kind.
I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. It's the doing that takes time and is full of frustration. One of my favorite book(s) ever are "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", and yet I wouldn't recommend them to anyone trying to learn physics. There is all this beautiful 'seeing' in the books, but there is no call for doing. One Christmas I bought my son (freshman in college) one of those alcohol powered Stirling heat engines. After he put it together and got it working we had to figure out how to make it go the fastest. We spent a good part of a day, drawing P-V diagrams, and arguing and trying things... it was all great fun, with much understanding for both of us.
Very interesting. VERY interesting. Our daughters are in 2nd and 5th grade and wrestling with math in various ways. I've had my own experience with growth but I'll read your other review before I say more about that. I'll see if I can interest my kids in Logo. Or figure it out myself.
This topic-essay brings to mind the ‘teach them how to think, not what to think’ cliche. But I think this is a false binary - teaching what and how are together necessary to enabling thinking in others. Am I thinking about this rightly would you say?
You're right. It is a false binary. As a parent, we see that our children are evil by default. We teach them how to constrain that evil and selfish behavior. We also teach them how to detect their own selfish behavior patterns to self-govern in the future. We do both, we teach them how to behave and how to govern future behavior. Both are necessary.
Statistically speaking your children are probably far to the right of the bell curve, as both you and Jane appear to be.
Even if that were true, offspring usually exhibit regression to the mean!
True and oft forgotten, but even more oft forgotten is that the mean your children regress to is the mean of their parents' families, which doesn't have to be that of the general population. If most of your family or Jane's is a standard deviation or more above the general population, your kids will probably be, too.
"The second thing that happened was that the smartest person I knew told me that he thought intelligence was learned. His argument went something like this: over the course of your life, you pick up cognitive tools that make you more effective."
And do we all pick up these cognitive tools equally efficiently? Why are some people better at picking it up than others? If intelligence itself is learned, then what do you call the mental ability that makes this learning possible and variable?
Reminds me of my education. I can still remember the flashcards and matching games I used to learn arithmetic, and can still do it in my head. As I moved away from such juvenile things like that into proper books full of symbols, my retention faded. I've passed trigonometry twice, but can barely recall anything except for sohcahtoa.
On the other hand, gamification itself doesn't help. My school wound up deleting all the "educational" games off its computers because they weren't accomplishing anything (besides provoking squabbles among students). At some point, the users have to transition from consumers to producers. I don't know how to promote that; personally, I like playing computer games, but I've bounced HARD off of learning to program. And as more things become black boxes guarded by proprietary tech and captured regulation, we're going to see more and more consumers, and fewer maker/modifiers.
I love your ability to write a great and compelling review on books that are totally outside the scope of my life. I have no kids (one of those people who missed the 'Nam chopper), don't work in a STEM field, and I find computer programming frightening and alien. I've always tested very well, so maybe I'm a person sabotaged by those bad teachers as a child, or maybe it's just that I found other subjects more interesting and have been just successful enough to avoid being forced to study other things.
As a non-programmer, I feel like there's a common trend of programmers aspiring to teach EVERYONE to code, and thinking coding is REALLY EASY but that it's TAUGHT WRONG. And yet, in the end, the vast majority of people can't code, and a large share of those who get into it solely to make money without a natural interest in it find it very challenging. Maybe programming is just really tough and luckily a few 'tists are naturally great at it.
Great post! I agree with you that even if Papert didn't precisely nail down the how, he's pointing at a very laden bough of low-hanging fruit. And actually, I think your anecdote about Logo might point to another issue besides the limited-by-engaged-adults one. Using code to move an actual robot seems to promise the tight feedback loop that helps young learners. But I wonder if that feedback loop is *too* tight: there's no need to imagine and predict what might happen in the world. You just type some stuff in and the robot goes or it doesn't. It's like doing a Sudoku where you check for correctness after every input: you don't see the harmony of a good strategy over random guessing, because random guessing works well enough when you can instantly learn if you're in a blind alley or not. It needs to be possible to be well and truly stuck for you to properly value the tools that get you unstuck. But the robot is always there and can't do anything but scoot along anyhow; how stuck can you ever be?
So I think the problem is that it can't *only* be primitives; then you have no motivation to come up with higher order structures. I think the real thing young learners should do with their computers is play roguelikes to cultivate Cyrus The Great's enjoyment of challenge. Get your kids to climb to A20 in Slay The Spire. They'll never succeed in understanding it solely through the brute primitives: if their inner monologue is only using cards like "energy, cards, relic" you might clear the bottom levels but you'll get hardstuck. They'll have to find the chunks that are actually useful ways to conceptualize Spire. Or better yet, they'll have to watch videos of pros explaining themselves, and realize that *they can just steal the developed ontologies of domain experts to leapfrog their development, and this works incredibly well, and why doesn't everyone do this all of the time.* That's how I'd do it. (Disclaimer that I am a classical air-type autist building crystalline mind palaces instead of eating whose parenting experience is "a week of being a summer camp counselor-in-training" and all parenting advice is presumably suspect.)
Two thumbs up for a StS reference! My spawn is playing and watching experts now. Almost beat the Act 2 boss for the first time.
I should ponder how to turn that into a developmental challenge.
This captures perfectly why I'm very skeptical at any attempts to use technology to improve education. There are studies and meta-analyses that suggest "give the kids iPads" or whatever it is this year could as well be placebo - quite apart from the fact that if it can be used for TikTok instead, it will be. And that's before we count the opportunity cost that the money you spent on computers could have been put towards teachers.
Will AI solve this problem? It's definitely not there yet, and seems to be better at keeping pupils stuck at the first, shallower type of knowledge than helping them get to the second, deeper kind.
Steven Barnes' horror-SF novel 'Charisma' used something like this to produce scary-smart super-charismatic superkids.
I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. It's the doing that takes time and is full of frustration. One of my favorite book(s) ever are "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", and yet I wouldn't recommend them to anyone trying to learn physics. There is all this beautiful 'seeing' in the books, but there is no call for doing. One Christmas I bought my son (freshman in college) one of those alcohol powered Stirling heat engines. After he put it together and got it working we had to figure out how to make it go the fastest. We spent a good part of a day, drawing P-V diagrams, and arguing and trying things... it was all great fun, with much understanding for both of us.
Very interesting. VERY interesting. Our daughters are in 2nd and 5th grade and wrestling with math in various ways. I've had my own experience with growth but I'll read your other review before I say more about that. I'll see if I can interest my kids in Logo. Or figure it out myself.
This topic-essay brings to mind the ‘teach them how to think, not what to think’ cliche. But I think this is a false binary - teaching what and how are together necessary to enabling thinking in others. Am I thinking about this rightly would you say?
You're right. It is a false binary. As a parent, we see that our children are evil by default. We teach them how to constrain that evil and selfish behavior. We also teach them how to detect their own selfish behavior patterns to self-govern in the future. We do both, we teach them how to behave and how to govern future behavior. Both are necessary.